International appeal

The Australian writer Eva Hornung is having international success with her novel Dog Boy, about a boy raised by dogs on the edge of Moscow.

The book is out next week in Britain, and soon in the US, Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Brazil. Her agent, Jenny Darling, has just sold Marathi rights. As Darling's press release says, "Imagine it: a novel written by a multilingual Australian, set in Moscow, being read in translation in the Indian state of Maharashtra." That's the state where Mumbai is the capital and the Australian cricket team is being made unwelcome.

Another Australian writer, 17-year-old Alexandra Adornetto, has sold her Young Adult trilogy of fantasy novels in the US for a six-figure advance. Her US agent, Jill Grinberg, did the deal with Feiwel and Friends, an imprint of Macmillan, and Adornetto will tour the US in September. She was 15 when her first book, The Shadow Thief, appeared here. Halo, the first in the new trilogy about teenage angels, will be out here in August.